it going?’
‘Great, Robbie. I’m Bliss.’ I looked at his friend and raised my eyebrows. ‘And you’re . . . Red?’
He laughed. ‘No, not Red, Rad. I guess it’s the accent.’
‘Hmm. Not much of a difference the way you say them, but I think I prefer Red. If it’s all the same to you.’
‘No worries. My name’s Magnus Radberg, but I’m not keen on Magnus.’
‘Swedish?’
‘Three generations back.’
‘You know Magnus means big in Latin . . . yeah, of course you do, schoolteachers must have bored the pants off you with that one.’
‘Too right.’ He laughed. He turned to Robbie apologetically. ‘You won’t believe this, mate, but I started looking at postcards and forgot about the beer. This altitude must be affecting my brain. I’ll go back.’
Robbie shook his head. ‘Jeez, mate, this trip’s not going to run on water. I’ll go. I suppose if you’re doing the dutiful postcard thing I’d better get some as well.’
He went out and Red and I went back to our cards, though my mind wasn’t on them as attentively as it had been.
We stopped writing when Robbie returned with three big bottles of Cusquena, the local beer. Red told me I could get my round later on at the English pub, so after downing the beer I went to have a shower. As I’d already discovered the hot – sorry, make that warm – water only appeared at erratic intervals, and the German guy had said that five o’clock was a good time. I hoped so, as I’d already had two cold showers since I arrived in Peru, though God knows the way I kept bumping into stunning men it was probably just as well.
I have to admit that I got pissed in the English pub. Well, it was happy hour, and pisco sours are a lot more alcoholic than I had thought judging from the one I had as an aperitif in the posh seafood restaurant in Miraflores. The trouble is, once you launch into a series of five of anything made from a large measure of spirits, getting pissed is fairly inevitable.
But I’m not a quitter and managed a couple of beers with dinner, where we had a great time, getting mixed up in a multinational group of fellow backpackers. It set the tone for the next few days, though apart from the booze and the laughs we managed to do the local sightseeing and explored the valley, which was breathtaking. Finally when Robbie was on one of his daily trips to the internet café – he was a real line freak – Red and I spent the afternoon in my room.
The S&M crowd use the expression ‘vanilla sex’ to describe normal straight sex. I suddenly found out why. Fucking Red was really nice, or as he would say, rilly, rilly nice, but after Carlos it lacked a bit of edge, a bit of spice. I tried not to make comparisons, though, and did enjoy taking charge myself, which after being totally helpless and passive was great. I rode him every way I knew how, with the holdups having him almost creaming his combats before he even got inside me – girlies in black stockings being, frankly, rare on the backpacker circuit.
And man, was he big. If ever a man was well named, etc. Everything else about him was, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by the girth and length of his cock. The first time we fucked, after he’d calmed down at the sight of the stockings, I was happy purely to sit on him for a few minutes, moving minutely, just to feel the rock-solid hugeness of him inside me. He got off even more on my admiration – I suppose Australian girls are a bit tight with the compliments – and it was good. You could even say that after Carlos it was unrestrained, abandoned lust, but something was missing . . . such as the restraints.
It was inevitable that we would team up for the Inca Trail. The guys had a big tent – they had to, otherwise the two of them wouldn’t fit in it – and said one more wouldn’t make much difference. We queued up for our train tickets and set off before the crack of dawn one Monday morning.
The train journey was